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Tuesday, June 13, 2017

"Campus students report more flexibility, reduced stress in taking an online version of a popular MIT course" says Office of Digital Learning.

Students who completed 6.S064, a fully-online pilot course modeled after the popular 6.002 (Circuits and Electronics), reported more flexibility with scheduling and less overall stress relative to their traditional classes.Photo: Office of Digital Learning

Last fall, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science (EECS) and MIT Office of Digital Learning piloted a full-credit
online course for a small cohort of residential students. The popular
6.002 (Circuits and Electronics) was offered as 6.S064, leveraging an
existing massive open online course (MOOC) available via the edX
platform and adding a private discussion forum for MIT students.

The Teaching and Learning Lab conducted an assessment of this pilot, which is now published as an internal working paper.
This preliminary assessment suggests that there are benefits to an
online-while-on-campus course format. Specifically, the students who
completed 6.S064 reported more flexibility with scheduling and less
overall stress relative to their traditional classes. While the findings
are based upon a small sample, the pilot bodes well for the possibility
of allowing more student choice in how and when they learn.

Sanjay Sarma, MIT vice president for open learning, says, “We are
committed to shaping the future of digital learning, and the 6.S064
experiment is a prime example of how we can use digital learning to
enhance the residential experience. Moreover, due to the online format
we are able to assess a student’s experience in ways that are simply not
possible in the traditional classroom.”The impetus for the experiment came from a group of students who were
frustrated by course scheduling conflicts and were seeking a solution
for completing courses off-cycle, particularly while participating in
off-campus internship programs. The students approached members of the
EECS faculty and requested access to a self-study program. In response,
MIT faculty members Anant Agarwal, David Perreault, and Anantha
Chandrakasan successfully petitioned the MIT Committee on the
Undergraduate Program to conduct a pilot of 6.S064.The experimental course allowed campus students to enroll in 6.002X, the first MOOC offered by MITx
in 2012 and one of the inaugural offerings from edX, the
online-learning platform founded by MIT and Harvard University.
Professor Gerald Sussman served as the faculty lead for both the open
online course and the experimental on-campus version. For the latter,
additional support processes were put in place, including a private
discussion forum only for the residential students. Teaching assistants
also updated campus students via weekly emails and regularly posted to
the online discussion board.“The goal was to experiment with new teaching methods that enhanced
the student experience and provided more flexibility,” says Anantha
Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science and EECS department head. “This offering allowed us
explore and respond to what our students have long said they wanted:
more flexibility, more on-demand learning, and more control. We are
thrilled with the response from students and possibilities for education
delivered in new ways.”The campus-based course team met weekly to review data on students’
progress and reached out to those who were having difficulty by
encouraging them to attend in-person office hours. Three on-campus
events were held for students, including two meet-and-greet sessions and
one review session prior to the final exam. At the end of 6.S064, Anne
E. Marshall, associate director for assessment and evaluation, analyzed
the data of the course, exploring self-reported student and instructor
reactions and learner data (use of resources, time on task, quizzes and
assessments) generated by the edX platform.Thirty-one students enrolled in the experimental online course and 27
completed it. Of those, more than half reported scheduling conflicts as
the reason for enrolling in 6.S064, suggesting that on-demand formats
have up-front benefits for residential learners. The students also
reported less overall stress with homework problem sets done online as
compared to traditional classroom assignments. Encouraged by real-time
feedback to assignments, the students tended to rework problems until
they could answer them correctly. The online exam format, however, could
also increase stress, as students were not awarded for partial credit
and did not have access their graded exams to review errors. To address
this issue, this spring, instructors experimented with allowing students
to submit written work for partial credit on the final exam.Read more... Source: MIT News

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Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.